As of midweek, his NCAA ration of four had swelled to the desired 25, and the Notre Dame sophomore linebacker had moved on to thoughts about what to order from the Cook-out restaurant’s drive-thru window once he set foot on Carolina soil.

“Oh my God, it feels so good to get a chance to go back,” said Moore, who starred at Southeast Raleigh High, about an hour and a half away from the Wake Forest campus and its compact 31,500-seat stadium.

“I’ve been to the stadium (BB&T Field) for a couple of games. Their coaches recruited me. And I’ve got a lot of friends on the team, so it will be really good.”

It will be the first of three straight ACC opponents for the Irish - Maryland and Boston College follow - re-stirring the discussion of whether Notre Dame football could or should be making regular trips to ACC country in future years and shed its long-protected independent status, for good.

“I wouldn’t be a fan of that at all,” Moore said matter-of-factly. “I grew up around all that stuff. For me, that’s basketball country. That’s basically what’s going on there. You eat, sleep, dream basketball. That’s what it is. I wanted to get away and blaze my own trail, so it’s worked out well.

“I love Notre Dame being an independent. That’s part of the reason why I came here. I didn’t really get a chance to travel too much as a kid. So being at Notre Dame is giving me a chance to go see new places - Pittsburgh for the first time. It will be California for the first time in a little bit, but it gives us so many opportunities to see new places and play everybody, get a little taste of everything.

“I think it’s a best-case scenario for us to stay independent.”The dissenting voices, though, are getting louder and more plentiful in the discussion. One of them these days belongs to Gene Corrigan, a 1952 Duke grad who followed his seven years as Notre Dame’s athletic director (1981-87) with a decade-long run as the commissioner of the ACC.

When Corrigan was reached by phone earlier this week, there was an awkward pause, then a filibuster of a laugh and then more silence when Corrigan was asked what the potential downside would be for Notre Dame losing its independence to cannonball into the bigger-but-soon-to-be-less-coastal ACC.

“I think it’s hard, because Notre Dame has always been there as an independent in football,” Corrigan said, “and that’s a difficult thing to give up. But times have changed. Times have changed like none of us could ever have predicted, really in the last five years.

“I would love to see them in it, because I love Notre Dame and I love the ACC. Nothing would make me happier, but I shouldn’t have a vote in this thing. I live in Charlottesville, Va. But, boy, if I had a vote, I would love for them to be in there, because I just think they fit so well.”

There’s an academic fit, the public school/private school fit. The other viable conference options - should ND bail on its limited partnership with the increasingly Conference USA-esque Big East - are the Big 12 and the Big Ten. The latter has just one private school among its 12 members - Northwestern. Same for the 10-team Big 12 (Baylor), though TCU is committed to coming aboard.

The ACC has four - Wake, Duke, Miami and Boston College, with Syracuse on the way as a fifth.“You look at the public institutions. North Carolina and Virginia are two of the top ones there,” Corrigan said. “You look at the other sports besides football - the women’s and men’s soccer, the men’s and women’s lacrosse. They are all the sports that the ACC is good in. So there’s a lot of fit across the board in sports that certainly doesn’t exist with the Big East.

“Except geography, I can’t imagine there’s a better or more logical place for them to be.”Then again, given Notre Dame’s resistance to being “regionalized,” playing in a conference whose footprint stretches from Massachusetts and soon Upstate New York to South Beach provides a potential conference schedule with a more national feel.

“And my guess,” Corrigan said, “is there are certain schools that Notre Dame plays that they want to continue to play. I couldn’t imagine them not playing Southern Cal - forever. I’m sure Southern Cal doesn’t want to stop playing Notre Dame, either.”

What Corrigan does not see happening is the ACC entertaining an arrangement with ND in which it plays a partial ACC schedule in exchange for relative football autonomy.

“Other than the Big East,” he said, “nobody is going to take Notre Dame if they don’t bring everything.”For his part, Notre Dame second-year coach Brian Kelly is squarely focused on beating the ACC this week - not joining it. But as Irish athletic director Jack Swarbrick has played the now high-stakes games of “what if?”, Kelly has had a voice in those discussions.

“Sure. I think I have an opinion,” Kelly said. “Jack's always been great in communicating with me about what my thoughts are. We look at everything. We look at recruiting. Your offense - is it unique within that particular conference? Your defense. All of those things go into the conversation.

“But I think it's been stated several times: We're going to do everything we can to be independent. We believe that that's our future. We just have to see what the future of college football looks like. I think that's probably the bigger question.”

Every day, it seems, though, the view changes. And sometimes, it changes in extreme ways no one saw coming. Certainly, not Corrigan.

“What’s happened in the last couple of years with the conferences is just startling,” he said. “I can’t get over it. Every time I hear something, it makes me blink and go ‘Holy Cow, how did we ever get to 12-team conferences and things like that?’ My goodness. It’s a rare time in intercollegiate athletics.

“Notre Dame has looked at a conference for quite a while, and it makes it more logical for them to investigate everything you possibly can. The one thing that you don’t want to do is you don’t want to get caught not being able to play games that you want to play. If everybody else is in a conference, and toward the end of the season, you can’t get any games, it’s not a very happy place to be.

“So I just think it’s one of those things where it would be natural for them to be investigating whatever their opportunities are. I know they’ve done that before. Even when I was there, we looked at whether it would be the right thing. And really there was no need for us to do it at that time.

“But these are very different times.”Staff writer Eric Hansen:ehansen@sbtinfo.com574-235-6112